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GRIM TALES.
BY E. NESBIT.
London:
A. D. INNES & CO.,
31 & 32, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.
1893.
My thanks are due to the Editors of _Longman's Magazine_, _Temple
Bar_, the _Argosy_, _Home Chimes_, and the _Illustrated London
News_, in which periodicals these stories first appeared.
E. NESBIT.
[Handwritten note from author:
10/4/97.
Will you just send me
a card to say if you
have any of these, &
if so which? In
great haste E. Nesbit
P.T.O.
Songs of the Maid Skrine
The Rosetree of Hildesheim Weston
Songs without answer Putnam
Songs of love & death Armour
A Trip to Fairyland Morgan
Arrows of Song
The Pilgrim Jewitt
Flamma Vestalis Mason
Scintilloe Carminis Almy]
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE EBONY FRAME 9
JOHN CHARRINGTON'S WEDDING 37
UNCLE ABRAHAM'S ROMANCE 57
THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMI-DETACHED 67
FROM THE DEAD 77
MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE 111
THE MASS FOR THE DEAD 145
GRIM TALES.
_THE EBONY FRAME._
To be rich is a luxurious sensation--the more so when you have plumbed
the depths of hard-up-ness as a Fleet Street hack, a picker-up of
unconsidered pars, a reporter, an unappreciated journalist--all callings
utterly inconsistent with one's family feeling and one's direct descent
from the Dukes of Picardy.
When my Aunt Dorcas died and left me seven hundred a year and a
furnished house in Chelsea, I felt that life had nothing left to offer
except immediate possession of the legacy. Even Mildred Mayhew, whom I
had hitherto regarded as my life's light, became less luminous. I was
not engaged to Mildred, but I lodged with her mother, and I sang duets
with Mildred, and gave her gloves when it would run to it, which was
seldom. She was a dear good girl, and I meant to marry her some day. It
is very nice to feel that a good little woman is thinking of you--it
helps you in your work--and it is pleasant to know she will say "Yes"
when you say "Will you?"
But, as I say, my legacy almost put Mildred out of my head, especially
as she was staying with friends in the country just then.
Before the first gloss was off my new mourning I was seated in my aunt's
own armchair in front of the fire in the dining-room of my own house. My
own house! It was grand, but rather lonely. I _did_ think of Mildred
just then.
The room was comfortably furnished with oak and leather. On the walls
hung a few fairly good oil-paintings, but the space above the
mantelpiece was disfigured by an exceedingly bad print, "The Trial of
Lord William Russell," framed in a dark frame. I got up to look at it.
I had visited my aunt with dutiful regularity, but I never remembered
seeing this frame before. It was not intended for a print, but for an
oil-painting. It was of fine ebony, beautifully and curiously carved.
I looked at it with growing interest, and when my aunt's housemaid--I
had retained her modest staff of servants--came in with the lamp, I
asked her how long the print had been there.
"Mistress only bought it two days afore she was took ill," she said;
"but the frame--she didn't want to buy a new one--so she got this out of
the attic. There's lots of curious old things there, sir."
"Had my aunt had this frame long?"
"Oh yes, sir. It come long afore I did, and I've been here seven years
come Christmas. There was a picture in it--that's upstairs too--but it's
that black and ugly it might as well be a chimley-back."
I felt a desire to see this picture. What if it were some priceless old
master in which my aunt's eyes had only seen rubbish?
Directly after breakfast next morning I paid a visit to the lumber-room.
It was crammed with old furniture enough to stock a curiosity shop. All
the house was furnished solidly in the early Victorian style, and in
this room everything not in keeping with the "drawing-room suite" ideal
was stowed away. Tables of papier-maché and mother-of-pearl,
straight-backed chairs with twisted feet and faded needlework cushions,
firescreens of old-world design, oak bureaux with brass handles, a
little work-table with its faded moth-eaten silk flutings hanging in
disconsolate shreds: on these and the dust that covered them blazed the
full daylight as I drew up the blinds. I promised myself a good time in
re-enshrining these household gods in my parlour, and promoting the
Victorian suite to the attic. But at present my business was to find the
picture as "black as the chimley-back;" and presently, behind a heap of
hideous still-life studies, I found it.
Jane the housemaid identified it at once. I took it downstairs carefully
and examined it. No subject, no colour were distinguishable. There was a
splodge of a darker tint in the middle, but whether it was figure or
tree or house no man could have told. It seemed to be painted on a very
thick panel bound with leather. I decided to send it to one of those
persons who pour on rotting family portraits the water of eternal
youth--mere soap and water Mr. Besant tells us it is; but even as I did
so the thought occurred to me to try my own restorative hand at a corner
of it.
My bath-sponge, soap, and nailbrush vigorously applied for a few seconds
showed me that there was no picture to clean! Bare oak presented itself
to my persevering brush. I tried the other side, Jane watching me with
indulgent interest. The same result. Then the truth dawned on me. Why
was the panel so thick? I tore off the leather binding, and the panel
divided and fell to the ground in a cloud of dust. There were two
pictures--they had been nailed face to face. I leaned them against the
wall, and the next moment I was leaning against it myself.
For one of the pictures was myself--a perfect portrait--no shade of
expression or turn of feature wanting. Myself--in a cavalier dress,
"love-locks and all!" When had this been done? And how, without my
knowledge? Was this some whim of my aunt's?
"Lor', sir!" the shrill surprise of Jane at my elbow; "what a lovely
photo it is! Was it a fancy ball, sir?"
"Yes," I stammered. "I--I don't think I want anything more now. You can
go."
She went; and I turned, still with my heart beating violently, to the
other picture. This was a woman of the type of beauty beloved of Burne
Jones and Rossetti--straight nose, low brows, full lips, thin hands,
large deep luminous eyes. She wore a black velvet gown. It was a
full-length portrait. Her arms rested on a table beside her, and her
head on her hands; but her face was turned full forward, and her eyes
met those of the spectator bewilderingly. On the table by her were
compasses and instruments whose uses I did not know, books, a goblet,
and a miscellaneous heap of papers and pens. I saw all this afterwards.
I believe it was a quarter of an hour before I could turn my eyes away
from hers. I have never seen any other eyes like hers. They appealed, as
a child's or a dog's do; they commanded, as might those of an empress.
"Shall I sweep up the dust, sir?" Curiosity had brought Jane back. I
acceded. I turned from her my portrait. I kept between her and the woman
in the black velvet. When I was alone again I tore down "The Trial of
Lord William Russell," and I put the picture of the woman in its strong
ebony frame.
Then I wrote to a frame-maker for a frame for my portrait. It had so
long lived face to face with this beautiful witch that I had not the
heart to banish it from her presence; from which, it will be perceived
that I am by nature a somewhat sentimental person.
The new frame came home, and I hung it opposite the fireplace. An
exhaustive search among my aunt's papers showed no explanation of the
portrait of myself, no history of the portrait of the woman with the
wonderful eyes. I only learned that all the old furniture together had
come to my aunt at the death of my great-uncle, the head of the family;
and I should have concluded that the resemblance was only a family one,
if every one who came in had not exclaimed at the "speaking likeness." I
adopted Jane's "fancy ball" explanation.
And there, one might suppose, the matter of the portraits ended. One
might suppose it, that is, if there were not evidently a good deal more
written here about it. However, to me, then, the matter seemed ended.
I went to see Mildred; I invited her and her mother to come and stay
with me. I rather avoided glancing at the picture in the ebony frame. I
could not forget, nor remember without singular emotion, the look in
the eyes of that woman when mine first met them. I shrank from meeting
that look again.
I reorganized the house somewhat, preparing for Mildred's visit. I
turned the dining-room into a drawing-room. I brought down much of the
old-fashioned furniture, and, after a long day of arranging and
re-arranging, I sat down before the fire, and, lying back in a pleasant
languor, I idly raised my eyes to the picture. I met her dark, deep
hazel eyes, and once more my gaze was held fixed as by a strong
magic--the kind of fascination that keeps one sometimes staring for
whole minutes into one's own eyes in the glass. I gazed into her eyes,
and felt my own dilate, pricked with a smart like the smart of tears.
"I wish," I said, "oh, how I wish you were a woman, and not a picture!
Come down! Ah, come down!"
I laughed at myself as I spoke; but even as I laughed I held out my
arms.
I was not sleepy; I was not drunk. I was as wide awake and as sober as
ever was a man in this world. And yet, as I held out my arms, I saw the
eyes of the picture dilate, her lips tremble--if I were to be hanged for
saying it, it is true. Her hands moved slightly, and a sort of flicker
of a smile passed over her face.
I sprang to my feet. "This won't do," I said, still aloud. "Firelight
does play strange tricks. I'll have the lamp."
I pulled myself together and made for the bell. My hand was on it, when
I heard a sound behind me, and turned--the bell still unrung. The fire
had burned low, and the corners of the room were deeply shadowed; but,
surely, there--behind the tall worked chair--was something darker than a
shadow.
"I must face this out," I said, "or I shall never be able to face myself
again." I left the bell, I seized the poker, and battered the dull coals
to a blaze. Then I stepped back resolutely, and looked up at the
picture. The ebony frame was empty! From the shadow of the worked chair
came a silken rustle, and out of the shadow the woman of the picture
was coming--coming towards me.
I hope I shall never again know a moment of terror so blank and
absolute. I could not have moved or spoken to save my life. Either all
the known laws of nature were nothing, or I was mad. I stood trembling,
but, I am thankful to remember, I stood still, while the black velvet
gown swept across the hearthrug towards me.
Next moment a hand touched me--a hand soft, warm, and human--and a low
voice said, "You called me. I am here."
At that touch and that voice the world seemed to give a sort of
bewildering half-turn. I hardly know how to express it, but at once it
seemed not awful--not even unusual--for portraits to become flesh--only
most natural, most right, most unspeakably fortunate.
I laid my hand on hers. I looked from her to my portrait. I could not
see it in the firelight.
"We are not strangers," I said.
"Oh no, not strangers." Those luminous eyes were looking up into
mine--those red lips were near me. With a passionate cry--a sense of
having suddenly recovered life's one great good, that had seemed wholly
lost--I clasped her in my arms. She was no ghost--she was a woman--the
only woman in the world.
"How long," I said, "O love--how long since I lost you?"
She leaned back, hanging her full weight on the hands that were clasped
behind my head.
"How can I tell how long? There is no time in hell," she answered.
It was not a dream. Ah, no--there are no such dreams. I wish to God
there could be. When in dreams do I see her eyes, hear her voice, feel
her lips against my cheek, hold her hands to my lips, as I did that
night--the supreme night of my life? At first we hardly spoke. It seemed
enough--
"... after long grief and pain,
To feel the arms of my true love
Round me once again."
* * * * *
It is very difficult to tell this story. There are no words to express
the sense of glad reunion, the complete realization of every hope and
dream of a life, that came upon me as I sat with my hand in hers and
looked into her eyes.
How could it have been a dream, when I left her sitting in the
straight-backed chair, and went down to the kitchen to tell the maids I
should want nothing more--that I was busy, and did not wish to be
disturbed; when I fetched wood for the fire with my own hands, and,
bringing it in, found her still sitting there--saw the little brown head
turn as I entered, saw the love in her dear eyes; when I threw myself at
her feet and blessed the day I was born, since life had given me this?
Not a thought of Mildred: all the other things in my life were a
dream--this, its one splendid reality.
"I am wondering," she said after a while, when we had made such cheer
each of the other as true lovers may after long parting--"I am
wondering how much you remember of our past."
"I remember nothing," I said. "Oh, my dear lady, my dear sweetheart--I
remember nothing but that I love you--that I have loved you all my
life."
"You remember nothing--really nothing?"
"Only that I am yours; that we have both suffered; that----Tell me, my
mistress dear, all that you remember. Explain it all to me. Make me
understand. And yet----No, I don't want to understand. It is enough that
we are together."
If it was a dream, why have I never dreamed it again?
She leaned down towards me, her arm lay on my neck, and drew my head
till it rested on her shoulder. "I am a ghost, I suppose," she said,
laughing softly; and her laughter stirred memories which I just grasped
at, and just missed. "But you and I know better, don't we? I will tell
you everything you have forgotten. We loved each other--ah! no, you have
not forgotten that--and when you came back from the war we were to be
married. Our pictures were painted before you went away. You know I was
more learned than women of that day. Dear one, when you were gone they
said I was a witch. They tried me. They said I should be burned. Just
because I had looked at the stars and had gained more knowledge than
they, they must needs bind me to a stake and let me be eaten by the
fire. And you far away!"
Her whole body trembled and shrank. O love, what dream would have told
me that my kisses would soothe even that memory?
"The night before," she went on, "the devil did come to me. I was
innocent before--you know it, don't you? And even then my sin was for
you--for you--because of the exceeding love I bore you. The devil came,
and I sold my soul to eternal flame. But I got a good price. I got the
right to come back, through my picture (if any one looking at it wished
for me), as long as my picture stayed in its ebony frame. That frame
was not carved by man's hand. I got the right to come back to you. Oh,
my heart's heart, and another thing I won, which you shall hear anon.
They burned me for a witch, they made me suffer hell on earth. Those
faces, all crowding round, the crackling wood and the smell of the
smoke----"
"O love! no more--no more."
"When my mother sat that night before my picture she wept, and cried,
'Come back, my poor lost child!' And I went to her, with glad leaps of
heart. Dear, she shrank from me, she fled, she shrieked and moaned of
ghosts. She had our pictures covered from sight and put again in the
ebony frame. She had promised me my picture should stay always there.
Ah, through all these years your face was against mine."
She paused.
"But the man you loved?"
"You came home. My picture was gone. They lied to you, and you married
another woman; but some day I knew you would walk the world again and
that I should find you."
"The other gain?" I asked.
"The other gain," she said slowly, "I gave my soul for. It is this. If
you also will give up your hopes of heaven I can remain a woman, I can
move in your world--I can be your wife. Oh, my dear, after all these
years, at last--at last."
"If I sacrifice my soul," I said slowly, with no thought of the
imbecility of such talk in our "so-called nineteenth century"--"if I
sacrifice my soul, I win you? Why, love, it's a contradiction in terms.
You _are_ my soul."
Her eyes looked straight into mine. Whatever might happen, whatever did
happen, whatever may happen, our two souls in that moment met, and
became one.
"Then you choose--you deliberately choose--to give up your hopes of
heaven for me, as I gave up mine for you?"
"I decline," I said, "to give up my hope of heaven on any terms. Tell me
what I must do, that you and I may make our heaven here--as now, my dear
love."
"I will tell you to-morrow," she said. "Be alone here to-morrow
night--twelve is ghost's time, isn't it?--and then I will come out of
the picture and never go back to it. I shall live with you, and die, and
be buried, and there will be an end of me. But we shall live first, my
heart's heart."
I laid my head on her knee. A strange drowsiness overcame me. Holding
her hand against my cheek, I lost consciousness. When I awoke the grey
November dawn was glimmering, ghost-like, through the uncurtained
window. My head was pillowed on my arm, which rested--I raised my head
quickly--ah! not on my lady's knee, but on the needle-worked cushion of
the straight-backed chair. I sprang to my feet. I was stiff with cold,
and dazed with dreams, but I turned my eyes on the picture. There she
sat, my lady, my dear love. I held out my arms, but the passionate cry I
would have uttered died on my lips. She had said twelve o'clock. Her
lightest word was my law. So I only stood in front of the picture and
gazed into those grey-green eyes till tears of passionate happiness
filled my own.
"Oh, my dear, my dear, how shall I pass the hours till I hold you
again?"
No thought, then, of my whole life's completion and consummation being a
dream.
I staggered up to my room, fell across my bed, and slept heavily and
dreamlessly. When I awoke it was high noon. Mildred and her mother were
coming to lunch.
I remembered, at one shock, Mildred's coming and her existence.
Now, indeed, the dream began.
With a penetrating sense of the futility of any action apart from _her_,
I gave the necessary orders for the reception of my guests. When Mildred
and her mother came I received them with cordiality; but my genial
phrases all seemed to be some one else's. My voice sounded like an echo;
my heart was other where.
Still, the situation was not intolerable until the hour when afternoon
tea was served in the drawing-room. Mildred and her mother kept the
conversational pot boiling with a profusion of genteel commonplaces, and
I bore it, as one can bear mild purgatories when one is in sight of
heaven. I looked up at my sweetheart in the ebony frame, and I felt that
anything that might happen, any irresponsible imbecility, any bathos of
boredom, was nothing, if, after it all, _she_ came to me again.
And yet, when Mildred, too, looked at the portrait, and said, "What a
fine lady! One of your flames, Mr. Devigne?" I had a sickening sense of
impotent irritation, which became absolute torture when Mildred--how
could I ever have admired that chocolate-box barmaid style of
prettiness?--threw herself into the high-backed chair, covering the
needlework with her ridiculous flounces, and added, "Silence gives
consent! Who is it, Mr. Devigne? Tell us all about her: I am sure she
has a story."
Poor little Mildred, sitting there smiling, serene in her confidence
that her every word charmed me--sitting there with her rather pinched
waist, her rather tight boots, her rather vulgar voice--sitting in the
chair where my dear lady had sat when she told me her story! I could not
bear it.
"Don't sit there," I said; "it's not comfortable!"
But the girl would not be warned. With a laugh that set every nerve in
my body vibrating with annoyance, she said, "Oh, dear! mustn't I even
sit in the same chair as your black-velvet woman?"
I looked at the chair in the picture. It _was_ the same; and in her
chair Mildred was sitting. Then a horrible sense of the reality of
Mildred came upon me. Was all this a reality after all? But for
fortunate chance might Mildred have occupied, not only her chair, but
her place in my life? I rose.
"I hope you won't think me very rude," I said; "but I am obliged to go
out."
I forget what appointment I alleged. The lie came readily enough.
I faced Mildred's pouts with the hope that she and her mother would not
wait dinner for me. I fled. In another minute I was safe, alone, under
the chill, cloudy autumn sky--free to think, think, think of my dear
lady.
I walked for hours along streets and squares; I lived over again and
again every look, word, and hand-touch--every kiss; I was completely,
unspeakably happy.
Mildred was utterly forgotten: my lady of the ebony frame filled my
heart and soul and spirit.
As I heard eleven boom through the fog, I turned, and went home.
When I got to my street, I found a crowd surging through it, a strong
red light filling the air.
A house was on fire. Mine.
I elbowed my way through the crowd.
The picture of my lady--that, at least, I could save!
As I sprang up the steps, I saw, as in a dream--yes, all this was
_really_ dream-like--I saw Mildred leaning out of the first-floor
window, wringing her hands.
"Come back, sir," cried a fireman; "we'll get the young lady out right
enough."
But _my_ lady? I went on up the stairs, cracking, smoking, and as hot
as hell, to the room where her picture was. Strange to say, I only felt
that the picture was a thing we should like to look on through the long
glad wedded life that was to be ours. I never thought of it as being one
with her.
As I reached the first floor I felt arms round my neck. The smoke was
too thick for me to distinguish features.
"Save me!" a voice whispered. I clasped a figure in my arms, and, with a
strange dis-ease, bore it down the shaking stairs and out into safety.
It was Mildred. I knew _that_ directly I clasped her.
"Stand back," cried the crowd.
"Every one's safe," cried a fireman.
The flames leaped from every window. The sky grew redder and redder. I
sprang from the hands that would have held me. I leaped up the steps. I
crawled up the stairs. Suddenly the whole horror of the situation came
on me. "_As long as my picture remains in the ebony frame._" What if
picture and frame perished together?
I fought with the fire, and with my own choking inability to fight with
it. I pushed on. I must save my picture. I reached the drawing-room.
As I sprang in I saw my lady--I swear it--through the smoke and the
flames, hold out her arms to me--to me--who came too late to save her,
and to save my own life's joy. I never saw her again.
Before I could reach her, or cry out to her, I felt the floor yield
beneath my feet, and I fell into the fiery hell below.
* * * * *
How did they save me? What does that matter? They saved me
somehow--curse them. Every stick of my aunt's furniture was destroyed.
My friends pointed out that, as the furniture was heavily insured, the
carelessness of a nightly-studious housemaid had done me no harm.
No harm!
That was how I won and lost my only love.
I deny, with all my soul in the denial, that it was a dream. There are
no such dreams. Dreams of longing and pain there are in plenty, but
dreams of complete, of unspeakable happiness--ah, no--it is the rest of
life that is the dream.
But if I think that, why have I married Mildred, and grown stout and
dull and prosperous?
I tell you it is all _this_ that is the dream; my dear lady only is the
reality. And what does it matter what one does in a dream?
JOHN CHARRINGTON'S WEDDING.
No one ever thought that May Forster would marry John Charrington; but
he thought differently, and things which John Charrington intended had a
queer way of coming to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went up
to Oxford. She laughed and refused him. He asked her again next time he
came home. Again she laughed, tossed her dainty blonde head, and again
refused. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed
bad habit, and laughed at him more than ever.
John was not the only man who wanted to marry her: she was the belle of
our village _coterie,_ and we were all in love with her more or less;
it was a sort of fashion, like heliotrope ties or Inverness capes.
Therefore we were as much annoyed as surprised when John Charrington
walked into our little local Club--we held it in a loft over the
saddler's, I remember--and invited us all to his wedding.
"Your wedding?"
"You don't mean it?"
"Who's the happy fair? When's it to be?"
John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then
he said--
"I'm sorry to deprive you fellows of your only joke--but Miss Forster
and I are to be married in September."
"You don't mean it?"
"He's got the mitten again, and it's turned his head."
"No," I said, rising, "I see it's true. Lend me a pistol some one--or a
first-class fare to the other end of Nowhere. Charrington has bewitched
the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it mesmerism, or a
love-potion, Jack?"
"Neither, sir, but a gift you'll never have--perseverance--and the best
luck a man ever had in this world."
There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all chaff of the
other fellows failed to draw him further.
The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Forster,
she blushed and smiled and dimpled, for all the world as though she were
in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. Upon my
word, I think she had. Women are strange creatures.
We were all asked to the wedding. In Brixham every one who was anybody
knew everybody else who was any one. My sisters were, I truly believe,
more interested in the _trousseau_ than the bride herself, and I was to
be best man. The coming marriage was much canvassed at afternoon
tea-tables, and at our little Club over the saddler's, and the question
was always asked: "Does she care for him?"
I used to ask that question myself in the early days of their
engagement, but after a certain evening in August I never asked it
again. I was coming home from the Club through the churchyard. Our
church is on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and
soft that one's footsteps are noiseless.
I made no sound as I vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded my way
between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that I heard John
Charrington's voice, and saw Her. May was sitting on a low flat
gravestone, her face turned towards the full splendour of the western
sun. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of love
for him; it was transfigured to a beauty I should not have believed
possible, even to that beautiful little face.
John lay at her feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of
the golden August evening.
"My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you
wanted me!"
I coughed at once to indicate my presence, and passed on into the shadow
fully enlightened.
The wedding was to be early in September. Two days before I had to run
up to town on business. The train was late, of course, for we are on the
South-Eastern, and as I stood grumbling with my watch in my hand, whom
should I see but John Charrington and May Forster. They were walking up
and down the unfrequented end of the platform, arm in arm, looking into
each other's eyes, careless of the sympathetic interest of the porters.
Of course I knew better than to hesitate a moment before burying myself
in the booking-office, and it was not till the train drew up at the
platform, that I obtrusively passed the pair with my Gladstone, and took
the corner in a first-class smoking-carriage. I did this with as good an
air of not seeing them as I could assume. I pride myself on my
discretion, but if John were travelling alone I wanted his company. I
had it.
"Hullo, old man," came his cheery voice as he swung his bag into my
carriage; "here's luck; I was expecting a dull journey!"
"Where are you off to?" I asked, discretion still bidding me turn my
eyes away, though I saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed.
"To old Branbridge's," he answered, shutting the door and leaning out
for a last word with his sweetheart.
"Oh, I wish you wouldn't go, John," she was saying in a low, earnest
voice. "I feel certain something will happen."
"Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after
to-morrow our wedding-day?"
"Don't go," she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have
sent my Gladstone on to the platform and me after it. But she wasn't
speaking to me. John Charrington was made differently; he rarely changed
his opinions, never his resolutions.
He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage
door.
"I must, May. The old boy's been awfully good to me, and now he's dying
I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for----" the rest
of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the
starting train.
"You're sure to come?" she spoke as the train moved.
"Nothing shall keep me," he answered; and we steamed out. After he had
seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his
corner and kept silence for a minute.
When he spoke it was to explain to me that his godfather, whose heir he
was, lay dying at Peasmarsh Place, some fifty miles away, and had sent
for John, and John had felt bound to go.
"I shall be surely back to-morrow," he said, "or, if not, the day after,
in heaps of time. Thank Heaven, one hasn't to get up in the middle of
the night to get married nowadays!"
"And suppose Mr. Branbridge dies?"
"Alive or dead I mean to be married on Thursday!" John answered,
lighting a cigar and unfolding the _Times_.
At Peasmarsh station we said "good-bye," and he got out, and I saw him
ride off; I went on to London, where I stayed the night.
When I got home the next afternoon, a very wet one, by the way, my
sister greeted me with--
"Where's Mr. Charrington?"
"Goodness knows," I answered testily. Every man, since Cain, has
resented that kind of question.
"I thought you might have heard from him," she went on, "as you're to
give him away to-morrow."
"Isn't he back?" I asked, for I had confidently expected to find him at
home.
"No, Geoffrey,"--my sister Fanny always had a way of jumping to
conclusions, especially such conclusions as were least favourable to her
fellow-creatures--"he has not returned, and, what is more, you may
depend upon it he won't. You mark my words, there'll be no wedding
to-morrow."
My sister Fanny has a power of annoying me which no other human being
possesses.
"You mark my words," I retorted with asperity, "you had better give up
making such a thundering idiot of yourself. There'll be more wedding
to-morrow than ever you'll take the first part in." A prophecy which, by
the way, came true.
But though I could snarl confidently to my sister, I did not feel so
comfortable when, late that night, I, standing on the doorstep of John's
house, heard that he had not returned. I went home gloomily through the
rain. Next morning brought a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, and all such
softness of air and beauty of cloud as go to make up a perfect day. I
woke with a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being
rather averse to facing that anxiety in the light of full wakefulness.
But with my shaving-water came a note from John which relieved my mind
and sent me up to the Forsters' with a light heart.
May was in the garden. I saw her blue gown through the hollyhocks as the
lodge gates swung to behind me. So I did not go up to the house, but
turned aside down the turfed path.
"He's written to you too," she said, without preliminary greeting, when
I reached her side.
"Yes, I'm to meet him at the station at three, and come straight on to
the church."
Her face looked pale, but there was a brightness in her eyes, and a
tender quiver about the mouth that spoke of renewed happiness.
"Mr. Branbridge begged him so to stay another night that he had not the
heart to refuse," she went on. "He is so kind, but I wish he hadn't
stayed."
I was at the station at half-past two. I felt rather annoyed with John.
It seemed a sort of slight to the beautiful girl who loved him, that he
should come as it were out of breath, and with the dust of travel upon
him, to take her hand, which some of us would have given the best years
of our lives to take.
But when the three o'clock train glided in, and glided out again having
brought no passengers to our little station, I was more than annoyed.
There was no other train for thirty-five minutes; I calculated that,
with much hurry, we might just get to the church in time for the
ceremony; but, oh, what a fool to miss that first train! What other man
could have done it?
That thirty-five minutes seemed a year, as I wandered round the station
reading the advertisements and the time-tables, and the company's
bye-laws, and getting more and more angry with John Charrington. This
confidence in his own power of getting everything he wanted the minute
he wanted it was leading him too far. I hate waiting. Every one does,
but I believe I hate it more than any one else. The three thirty-five
was late, of course.
I ground my pipe between my teeth and stamped with impatience as I
watched the signals. Click. The signal went down. Five minutes later I
flung myself into the carriage that I had brought for John.
"Drive to the church!" I said, as some one shut the door. "Mr.
Charrington hasn't come by this train."
Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man? Could he have
been taken suddenly ill? I had never known him have a day's illness in
his life. And even so he might have telegraphed. Some awful accident
must have happened to him. The thought that he had played her false
never--no, not for a moment--entered my head. Yes, something terrible
had happened to him, and on me lay the task of telling his bride. I
almost wished the carriage would upset and break my head so that some
one else might tell her, not I, who--but that's nothing to do with his
story.
It was five minutes to four as we drew up at the churchyard gate. A
double row of eager on-lookers lined the path from lychgate to porch. I
sprang from the carriage and passed up between them. Our gardener had a
good front place near the door. I stopped.
"Are they waiting still, Byles?" I asked, simply to gain time, for of
course I knew they were by the waiting crowd's attentive attitude.
"Waiting, sir? No, no, sir; why, it must be over by now."
"Over! Then Mr. Charrington's come?"
"To the minute, sir; must have missed you somehow, and, I say, sir,"
lowering his voice, "I never see Mr. John the least bit so afore, but my
opinion is he's been drinking pretty free. His clothes was all dusty and
his face like a sheet. I tell you I didn't like the looks of him at all,
and the folks inside are saying all sorts of things. You'll see,
something's gone very wrong with Mr. John, and he's tried liquor. He
looked like a ghost, and in he went with his eyes straight before him,
with never a look or a word for none of us; him that was always such a
gentleman!"
I had never heard Byles make so long a speech. The crowd in the
churchyard were talking in whispers and getting ready rice and slippers
to throw at the bride and bridegroom. The ringers were ready with their
hands on the ropes to ring out the merry peal as the bride and
bridegroom should come out.
A murmur from the church announced them; out they came. Byles was right.
John Charrington did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, his
hair was disarranged. He seemed to have been in some row, for there was
a black mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. But his pallor was
not greater than that of the bride, who might have been carved in
ivory--dress, veil, orange blossoms, face and all.
As they passed out the ringers stooped--there were six of them--and
then, on the ears expecting the gay wedding peal, came the slow tolling
of the passing bell.
A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed through
us all. But the ringers themselves dropped the ropes and fled like
rabbits out into the sunlight. The bride shuddered, and grey shadows
came about her mouth, but the bridegroom led her on down the path where
the people stood with the handfuls of rice; but the handfuls were never
thrown, and the wedding-bells never rang. In vain the ringers were urged
to remedy their mistake: they protested with many whispered expletives
that they would see themselves further first.
In a hush like the hush in the chamber of death the bridal pair passed
into their carriage and its door slammed behind them.
Then the tongues were loosed. A babel of anger, wonder, conjecture from
the guests and the spectators.
"If I'd seen his condition, sir," said old Forster to me as we drove
off, "I would have stretched him on the floor of the church, sir, by
Heaven I would, before I'd have let him marry my daughter!"
Then he put his head out of the window.
"Drive like hell," he cried to the coachman; "don't spare the horses."
He was obeyed. We passed the bride's carriage. I forebore to look at it,
and old Forster turned his head away and swore. We reached home before
it.
We stood in the hall doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun, and in about
half a minute we heard wheels crunching the gravel. When the carriage
stopped in front of the steps old Forster and I ran down.
"Great Heaven, the carriage is empty! And yet----"
I had the door open in a minute, and this is what I saw--
No sign of John Charrington; and of May, his wife, only a huddled heap
of white satin lying half on the floor of the carriage and half on the
seat.
"I drove straight here, sir," said the coachman, as the bride's father
lifted her out; "and I'll swear no one got out of the carriage."
We carried her into the house in her bridal dress and drew back her
veil. I saw her face. Shall I ever forget it? White, white and drawn
with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as I have never
seen since except in dreams. And her hair, her radiant blonde hair, I
tell you it was white like snow.
As we stood, her father and I, half mad with the horror and mystery of
it, a boy came up the avenue--a telegraph boy. They brought the orange
envelope to me. I tore it open.
"_Mr. Charrington was thrown from the dogcart on his way to the station
at half-past one. Killed on the spot!_"
And he was married to May Forster in our parish church at _half-past
three_, in presence of half the parish.
"_I shall be married, dead or alive!_"
What had passed in that carriage on the homeward drive? No one knows--no
one will ever know. Oh, May! oh, my dear!
Before a week was over they laid her beside her husband in our little
churchyard on the thyme-covered hill--the churchyard where they had kept
their love-trysts.
Thus was accomplished John Charrington's wedding.
_UNCLE ABRAHAM'S ROMANCE._
"No, my dear," my Uncle Abraham answered me, "no--nothing romantic ever
happened to me--unless--but no: that wasn't romantic either----"
I was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham
was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own
rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair's right hand, a
portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature-painter's art
had been powerless to disguise--a woman with large lustrous eyes and
perfect oval face.
I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough
in my baby days I had asked, "Who's that, uncle?" always receiving the
same answer: "A lady who died long ago, my dear."
As I looked again at the picture, I asked, "Was she like this?"
"Who?"
"Your--your romance!"
Uncle Abraham looked hard at me. "Yes," he said at last. "Very--very
like."
I sat down on the floor by him. "Won't you tell me about her?"
"There's nothing to tell," he said. "I think it was fancy, mostly, and
folly; but it's the realest thing in my long life, my dear."
A long pause. I kept silence. "Hurry no man's cattle" is a good motto,
especially with old people.
"I remember," he said in the dreamy tone always promising so well to the
ear that a story delighteth--"I remember, when I was a young man, I was
very lonely indeed. I never had a sweetheart. I was always lame, my
dear, from quite a boy; and the girls used to laugh at me."
He sighed. Presently he went on--
"And so I got into the way of mooning off by myself in lonely places,
and one of my favourite walks was up through our churchyard, which was
set high on a hill in the middle of the marsh country. I liked that
because I never met any one there. It's all over, years ago. I was a
silly lad; but I couldn't bear of a summer evening to hear a rustle and
a whisper from the other side of the hedge, or maybe a kiss as I went
by.
"Well, I used to go and sit all by myself in the churchyard, which was
always sweet with thyme, and quite light (on account of its being so
high) long after the marshes were dark. I used to watch the bats
flitting about in the red light, and wonder why God didn't make every
one's legs straight and strong, and wicked follies like that. But by the
time the light was gone I had always worked it off, so to speak, and
could go home quietly and say my prayers without any bitterness.
"Well, one hot night in August, when I had watched the sunset fade and
the crescent moon grow golden, I was just stepping over the low stone
wall of the churchyard when I heard a rustle behind me. I turned round,
expecting it to be a rabbit or a bird. It was a woman."
He looked at the portrait. So did I.
"Yes," he said, "that was her very face. I was a bit scared and said
something--I don't know what--and she laughed and said, 'Did I think she
was a ghost?' and I answered back, and I stayed talking to her over the
churchyard wall till 'twas quite dark, and the glowworms were out in the
wet grass all along the way home.
"Next night I saw her again; and the next night and the next. Always at
twilight time; and if I passed any lovers leaning on the stiles in the
marshes it was nothing to me now."
Again my uncle paused. "It's very long ago," he said slowly, "and I'm an
old man; but I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was
always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me. I don't know how long it
went on--you don't measure time in dreams--but at last your grandfather
said I looked as if I had one foot in the grave, and he would be sending
me to stay with our kin at Bath and take the waters. I had to go. I
could not tell my father why I would rather had died than go."
"What was her name, uncle?" I asked.
"She never would tell me her name, and why should she? I had names
enough in my heart to call her by. Marriage? My dear, even then I knew
marriage was not for me. But I met her night after night, always in our
churchyard where the yew-trees were and the lichened gravestones. It was
there we always met and always parted. The last time was the night
before I went away. She was very sad, and dearer than life itself. And
she said--
"'If you come back before the new moon I shall meet you here just as
usual. But if the new moon shines on this grave and you are not
here--you will never see me again any more.'
"She laid her hand on the yellow lichened tomb against which we had been
leaning. It was an old weather-worn stone, and bore on it the
inscription--
'SUSANNAH KINGSNORTH,
_Ob._ 1713.'
"'I shall be here.' I said.
"'I mean it,' she said, with deep and sudden seriousness, 'it is no
fancy. You will be here when the new moon shines?'"
"I promised, and after a while we parted.
"I had been with my kinsfolk at Bath nearly a month. I was to go home on
the next day, when, turning over a case in the parlour, I came upon that
miniature. I could not speak for a minute. At last I said, with dry
tongue, and heart beating to the tune of heaven and hell--
"'Who is this?'
"'That?' said my aunt. 'Oh! she was betrothed to one of our family many
years ago, but she died before the wedding. They say she was a bit of a
witch. A handsome one, wasn't she?'
"I looked again at the face, the lips, the eyes of my dear and lovely
love, whom I was to meet to-morrow night when the new moon shone on that
tomb in our churchyard.
"'Did you say she was dead?' I asked, and I hardly knew my own voice.
"'Years and years ago! Her name's on the back and her date----'
"I took the portrait from its faded red-velvet bed, and read on the
back--'SUSANNAH KINGSNORTH, _Ob._ 1713.'
"That was in 1813." My uncle stopped short.
"What happened?" I asked breathlessly.
"I believe I had a fit," my uncle answered slowly; "at any rate, I was
very ill."
"And you missed the new moon on the grave?"
"I missed the new moon on the grave."
"And you never saw her again?"
"I never saw her again----"
"But, uncle, do you really believe?--Can the dead?--was she--did
you----"
My uncle took out his pipe and filled it.
"It's a long time ago," he said, "a many, many years. Old man's tales,
my dear! Old man's tales! Don't you take any notice of them."
He lighted the pipe, puffed silently a moment or two, and then added:
"But I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was lame, and the
girls used to laugh at me."
_THE MYSTERY OF THE SEMI-DETACHED._
He was waiting for her; he had been waiting an hour and a half in a
dusty suburban lane, with a row of big elms on one side and some
eligible building sites on the other--and far away to the south-west the
twinkling yellow lights of the Crystal Palace. It was not quite like a
country lane, for it had a pavement and lamp-posts, but it was not a bad
place for a meeting all the same; and farther up, towards the cemetery,
it was really quite rural, and almost pretty, especially in twilight.
But twilight had long deepened into night, and still he waited. He loved
her, and he was engaged to be married to her, with the complete
disapproval of every reasonable person who had been consulted. And this
half-clandestine meeting was to-night to take the place of the
grudgingly sanctioned weekly interview--because a certain rich uncle was
visiting at her house, and her mother was not the woman to acknowledge
to a moneyed uncle, who might "go off" any day, a match so deeply
ineligible as hers with him.
So he waited for her, and the chill of an unusually severe May evening
entered into his bones.
The policeman passed him with but a surly response to his "Good night."
The bicyclists went by him like grey ghosts with fog-horns; and it was
nearly ten o'clock, and she had not come.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned towards his lodgings. His road led
him by her house--desirable, commodious, semi-detached--and he walked
slowly as he neared it. She might, even now, be coming out. But she was
not. There was no sign of movement about the house, no sign of life, no
lights even in the windows. And her people were not early people.
He paused by the gate, wondering.
Then he noticed that the front door was open--wide open--and the street
lamp shone a little way into the dark hall. There was something about
all this that did not please him--that scared him a little, indeed. The
house had a gloomy and deserted air. It was obviously impossible that it
harboured a rich uncle. The old man must have left early. In which
case----
He walked up the path of patent-glazed tiles, and listened. No sign of
life. He passed into the hall. There was no light anywhere. Where was
everybody, and why was the front door open? There was no one in the
drawing-room, the dining-room and the study (nine feet by seven) were
equally blank. Every one was out, evidently. But the unpleasant sense
that he was, perhaps, not the first casual visitor to walk through that
open door impelled him to look through the house before he went away
and closed it after him. So he went upstairs, and at the door of the
first bedroom he came to he struck a wax match, as he had done in the
sitting-rooms. Even as he did so he felt that he was not alone. And he
was prepared to see _something_; but for what he saw he was not
prepared. For what he saw lay on the bed, in a white loose gown--and it
was his sweetheart, and its throat was cut from ear to ear. He doesn't
know what happened then, nor how he got downstairs and into the street;
but he got out somehow, and the policeman found him in a fit, under the
lamp-post at the corner of the street. He couldn't speak when they
picked him up, and he passed the night in the police-cells, because the
policeman had seen plenty of drunken men before, but never one in a fit.
The next morning he was better, though still very white and shaky. But
the tale he told the magistrate was convincing, and they sent a couple
of constables with him to her house.
There was no crowd about it as he had fancied there would be, and the
blinds were not down.
As he stood, dazed, in front of the door, it opened, and she came out.
He held on to the door-post for support.
"_She's_ all right, you see," said the constable, who had found him
under the lamp. "I told you you was drunk, but you _would_ know
best----"
When he was alone with her he told her--not all--for that would not bear
telling--but how he had come into the commodious semi-detached, and how
he had found the door open and the lights out, and that he had been into
that long back room facing the stairs, and had seen something--in even
trying to hint at which he turned sick and broke down and had to have
brandy given him.
"But, my dearest," she said, "I dare say the house was dark, for we were
all at the Crystal Palace with my uncle, and no doubt the door was open,
for the maids _will_ run out if they're left. But you could not have
been in that room, because I locked it when I came away, and the key was
in my pocket. I dressed in a hurry and I left all my odds and ends lying
about."
"I know," he said; "I saw a green scarf on a chair, and some long brown
gloves, and a lot of hairpins and ribbons, and a prayer-book, and a lace
handkerchief on the dressing-table. Why, I even noticed the almanack on
the mantelpiece--October 21. At least it couldn't be that, because this
is May. And yet it was. Your almanac is at October 21, isn't it?"
"No, of course it isn't," she said, smiling rather anxiously; "but all
the other things were just as you say. You must have had a dream, or a
vision, or something."
He was a very ordinary, commonplace, City young man, and he didn't
believe in visions, but he never rested day or night till he got his
sweetheart and her mother away from that commodious semi-detached, and
settled them in a quite distant suburb. In the course of the removal he
incidentally married her, and the mother went on living with them.
His nerves must have been a good bit shaken, because he was very queer
for a long time, and was always inquiring if any one had taken the
desirable semi-detached; and when an old stockbroker with a family took
it, he went the length of calling on the old gentleman and imploring him
by all that he held dear, not to live in that fatal house.
"Why?" said the stockbroker, not unnaturally.
And then he got so vague and confused, between trying to tell why and
trying not to tell why, that the stockbroker showed him out, and thanked
his God he was not such a fool as to allow a lunatic to stand in the way
of his taking that really remarkably cheap and desirable semi-detached
residence.
Now the curious and quite inexplicable part of this story is that when
she came down to breakfast on the morning of the 22nd of October she
found him looking like death, with the morning paper in his hand. He
caught hers--he couldn't speak, and pointed to the paper. And there she
read that on the night of the 21st a young lady, the stockbroker's
daughter, had been found, with her throat cut from ear to ear, on the
bed in the long back bedroom facing the stairs of that desirable
semi-detached.
_FROM THE DEAD._
I.
"But true or not true, your brother is a scoundrel. No man--no decent
man--tells such things."
"He did not tell me. How dare you suppose it? I found the letter in his
desk; and she being my friend and you being her lover, I never thought
there could be any harm in my reading her letter to my brother. Give me
back the letter. I was a fool to tell you."
Ida Helmont held out her hand for the letter.
"Not yet," I said, and I went to the window. The dull red of a London
sunset burned on the paper, as I read in the quaint, dainty handwriting
I knew so well and had kissed so often--
"Dear, I do--I do love you; but it's impossible. I must marry
Arthur. My honour is engaged. If he would only set me free--but he
never will. He loves me so foolishly. But as for me, it is you I
love--body, soul, and spirit. There is no one in my heart but you. I
think of you all day, and dream of you all night. And we must part.
And that is the way of the world. Good-bye!--Yours, yours, yours,
ELVIRE."
I had seen the handwriting, indeed, often enough. But the passion
written there was new to me. That I had not seen.
I turned from the window wearily. My sitting-room looked strange to me.
There were my books, my reading-lamp, my untasted dinner still on the
table, as I had left it when I rose to dissemble my surprise at Ida
Helmont's visit--Ida Helmont, who now sat in my easy-chair looking at me
quietly.
"Well--do you give me no thanks?"
"You put a knife in my heart, and then ask for thanks?"
"Pardon me," she said, throwing up her chin. "I have done nothing but
show you the truth. For that one should expect no gratitude--may I ask,
out of mere curiosity, what you intend to do?"
"Your brother will tell you----"
She rose suddenly, pale to the lips.
"You will not tell my brother?" she began.
"That you have read his private letters? Certainly not!"
She came towards me--her gold hair flaming in the sunset light.
"Why are you so angry with me?" she said. "Be reasonable. What else
could I do?"
"I don't know."
"Would it have been right not to tell you?"
"I don't know. I only know that you've put the sun out, and I haven't
got used to the dark yet."
"Believe me," she said, coming still nearer to me, and laying her hands
in the lightest light touch on my shoulders, "believe me, she never
loved you."
There was a softness in her tone that irritated and stimulated me. I
moved gently back, and her hands fell by her sides.
"I beg your pardon," I said. "I have behaved very badly. You were quite
right to come, and I am not ungrateful. Will you post a letter for me?"
I sat down and wrote--
"I give you back your freedom. The only gift of mine that can
please you now.
"ARTHUR."
I held the sheet out to Miss Helmont, and, when she had glanced at it, I
sealed, stamped, and addressed it.
"Good-bye," I said then, and gave her the letter. As the door closed
behind her I sank into my chair, and I am not ashamed to say that I
cried like a child or a fool over my lost plaything--the little
dark-haired woman who loved some one else with "body, soul, and
spirit."
I did not hear the door open or any foot on the floor, and therefore I
started when a voice behind me said--
"Are you so very unhappy? Oh, Arthur, don't think I am not sorry for
you!"
"I don't want any one to be sorry for me, Miss Helmont," I said.
She was silent a moment. Then, with a quick, sudden, gentle movement she
leaned down and kissed my forehead--and I heard the door softly close.
Then I knew that the beautiful Miss Helmont loved me.
At first that thought only fleeted by--a light cloud against a grey
sky--but the next day reason woke, and said--
"Was Miss Helmont speaking the truth? Was it possible that----?"
I determined to see Elvire, to know from her own lips whether by happy
fortune this blow came, not from her, but from a woman in whom love
might have killed honesty.
I walked from Hampstead to Gower Street. As I trod its long length, I
saw a figure in pink come out of one of the houses. It was Elvire. She
walked in front of me to the corner of Store Street. There she met Oscar
Helmont. They turned and met me face to face, and I saw all I needed to
see. They loved each other. Ida Helmont had spoken the truth. I bowed
and passed on. Before six months were gone they were married, and before
a year was over I had married Ida Helmont.
What did it I don't know. Whether it was remorse for having, even for
half a day, dreamed that she could be so base as to forge a lie to gain
a lover, or whether it was her beauty, or the sweet flattery of the
preference of a woman who had half her acquaintances at her feet, I
don't know; anyhow, my thoughts turned to her as to their natural home.
My heart, too, took that road, and before very long I loved her as I had
never loved Elvire. Let no one doubt that I loved her--as I shall never
love again, please God!
There never was any one like her. She was brave and beautiful, witty and
wise, and beyond all measure adorable. She was the only woman in the
world. There was a frankness--a largeness of heart--about her that made
all other women seem small and contemptible. She loved me and I
worshipped her. I married her, I stayed with her for three golden weeks,
and then I left her. Why?
Because she told me the truth. It was one night--late--we had sat all
the evening in the verandah of our seaside lodging watching the
moonlight on the water and listening to the soft sound of the sea on the
sand. I have never been so happy; I never shall be happy any more, I
hope.
"Heart's heart," she said, leaning her gold head against my shoulder,
"how much do you love me?"
"How much?"
"Yes--how much? I want to know what place it is I hold in your heart. Am
I more to you than any one else?"
"My love!"
"More than yourself?"
"More than my life!"
"I believe you," she said. Then she drew a long breath, and took my
hands in hers. "It can make no difference. Nothing in heaven or earth
can come between us now."
"Nothing," I said. "But, sweet, my wife, what is it?"
For she was deathly pale.
"I must tell you," she said; "I cannot hide anything now from you,
because I am yours--body, soul, and spirit."
The phrase was an echo that stung me.
The moonlight shone on her gold hair, her warm, soft, gold hair, and on
her pale face.
"Arthur," she said, "you remember my coming to you at Hampstead with
that letter?"
"Yes, my sweet, and I remember how you----"
"Arthur!"--she spoke fast and low--"Arthur, that letter was a forgery.
She never wrote it. I----"
She stopped, for I had risen and flung her hands from me, and stood
looking at her. God help me! I thought it was anger at the lie I felt. I
know now it was only wounded vanity that smarted in me. That _I_ should
have been tricked, that _I_ should have been deceived, that _I_ should
have been led on to make a fool of myself! That _I_ should have married
the woman who had befooled me! At that moment she was no longer the wife
I adored--she was only a woman who had forged a letter and tricked me
into marrying her.
I spoke; I denounced her; I said I would never speak to her again. I
felt it was rather creditable in me to be so angry. I said I would have
no more to do with a liar and forger.
I don't know whether I expected her to creep to my knees and implore
forgiveness. I think I had some vague idea that I could by-and-by
consent with dignity to forgive and forget. I did not mean what I said.
No, no; I did not mean a word of it. While I was saying it I was longing
for her to weep and fall at my feet, that I might raise her and hold her
in my arms again.
But she did not fall at my feet; she stood quietly looking at me.
"Arthur," she said, as I paused for breath, "let me explain--she--I----"
"There is nothing to explain," I said hotly, still with that foolish
sense of there being something rather noble in my indignation, as one
feels when one calls one's self a miserable sinner. "You are a liar and
forger, and that is enough for me. I will never speak to you again. You
have wrecked my life----"
"Do you mean that?" she said, interrupting me, and leaning forward to
look at me. Tears lay on her cheeks, but she was not crying now.
I hesitated. I longed to take her in my arms and say--"Lay your head
here, my darling, and cry here, and know how I love you."
But instead I kept silence.
"_Do_ you mean it?" she persisted.
Then she put her hand on my arm. I longed to clasp it and draw her to
me.
Instead, I shook it off, and said--
"Mean it? Yes--of course I mean it. Don't touch me, please! You have
ruined my life."
She turned away without a word, went into our room, and shut the door.
I longed to follow her, to tell her that if there was anything to
forgive I forgave it.
Instead, I went out on the beach, and walked away under the cliffs.
The moonlight and the solitude, however, presently brought me to a
better mind. Whatever she had done had been done for love of me--I knew
that. I would go home and tell her so--tell her that whatever she had
done she was my dearest life, my heart's one treasure. True, my ideal of
her was shattered, but, even as she was, what was the whole world of
women compared to her? I hurried back, but in my resentment and evil
temper I had walked far, and the way back was very long. I had been
parted from her for three hours by the time I opened the door of the
little house where we lodged. The house was dark and very still. I
slipped off my shoes and crept up the narrow stairs, and opened the door
of our room quite softly. Perhaps she would have cried herself to sleep,
and I would lean over her and waken her with my kisses and beg her to
forgive me. Yes, it had come to that now.
I went into the room--I went towards the bed. She was not there. She was
not in the room, as one glance showed me. She was not in the house, as I
knew in two minutes. When I had wasted a priceless hour in searching the
town for her, I found a note on the dressing-table--
"Good-bye! Make the best of what is left of your life. I will spoil it
no more."
She was gone, utterly gone. I rushed to town by the earliest morning
train, only to find that her people knew nothing of her. Advertisement
failed. Only a tramp said he had met a white lady on the cliff, and a
fisherman brought me a handkerchief marked with her name that he had
found on the beach.
I searched the country far and wide, but I had to go back to London at
last, and the months went by. I won't say much about those months,
because even the memory of that suffering turns me faint and sick at
heart. The police and detectives and the Press failed me utterly. Her
friends could not help me, and were, moreover, wildly indignant with me,
especially her brother, now living very happily with my first love.
I don't know how I got through those long weeks and months. I tried to
write; I tried to read; I tried to live the life of a reasonable human
being. But it was impossible. I could not endure the companionship of my
kind. Day and night I almost saw her face--almost heard her voice. I
took long walks in the country, and her figure was always just round
the next turn of the road--in the next glade of the wood. But I never
quite saw her--never quite heard her. I believe I was not altogether
sane at that time. At last, one morning as I was setting out for one of
those long walks that had no goal but weariness, I met a telegraph boy,
and took the red envelope from his hand.
On the pink paper inside was written--
"Come to me at once. I am dying. You must come.--IDA.--Apinshaw
Farm, Mellor, Derbyshire."
There was a train at twelve to Marple, the nearest station. I took it. I
tell you there are some things that cannot be written about. My life for
those long months was one of them, that journey was another. What had
her life been for those months? That question troubled me, as one is
troubled in every nerve at the sight of a surgical operation or a wound
inflicted on a being dear to one. But the overmastering sensation was
joy--intense, unspeakable joy. She was alive! I should see her again. I
took out the telegram and looked at it: "I am dying." I simply did not
believe it. She could not die till she had seen me. And if she had lived
all those months without me, she could live now, when I was with her
again, when she knew of the hell I had endured apart from her, and the
heaven of our meeting. She must live. I would not let her die.
There was a long drive over bleak hills. Dark, jolting, infinitely
wearisome. At last we stopped before a long, low building, where one or
two lights gleamed faintly. I sprang out.
The door opened. A blaze of light made me blink and draw back. A woman
was standing in the doorway.
"Art thee Arthur Marsh?" she said.
"Yes."
"Then, th'art ower late. She's dead."
II.
I went into the house, walked to the fire, and held out my hands to it
mechanically, for, though the night was May, I was cold to the bone.
There were some folks standing round the fire and lights flickering.
Then an old woman came forward with the northern instinct of
hospitality.
"Thou'rt tired," she said, "and mazed-like. Have a sup o' tea."
I burst out laughing. It was too funny. I had travelled two hundred
miles to see _her_; and she was dead, and they offered me tea. They drew
back from me as if I had been a wild beast, but I could not stop
laughing. Then a hand was laid on my shoulder, and some one led me into
a dark room, lighted a lamp, set me in a chair, and sat down opposite
me. It was a bare parlour, coldly furnished with rush chairs and
much-polished tables and presses. I caught my breath, and grew suddenly
grave, and looked at the woman who sat opposite me.
"I was Miss Ida's nurse," said she; "and she told me to send for you.
Who are you?"
"Her husband----"
The woman looked at me with hard eyes, where intense surprise struggled
with resentment. "Then, may God forgive you!" she said. "What you've
done I don't know; but it'll be 'ard work forgivin' _you_--even for
_Him_!"
"Tell me," I said, "my wife----"
"Tell you?" The bitter contempt in the woman's tone did not hurt me;
what was it to the self-contempt that had gnawed my heart all these
months? "Tell you? Yes, I'll tell you. Your wife was that ashamed of
you, she never so much as told me she was married. She let me think
anything I pleased sooner than that. She just come 'ere an' she said,
'Nurse, take care of me, for I am in mortal trouble. And don't let them
know where I am,' says she. An' me bein' well married to an honest man,
and well-to-do here, I was able to do it, by the blessing."
"Why didn't you send for me before?" It was a cry of anguish wrung from
me.
"I'd _never_ 'a sent for you--it was _her_ doin'. Oh, to think as God
A'mighty's made men able to measure out such-like pecks o' trouble for
us womenfolk! Young man, I dunno what you did to 'er to make 'er leave
you; but it muster bin something cruel, for she loved the ground you
walked on. She useter sit day after day, a-lookin' at your picture an'
talkin' to it an' kissin' of it, when she thought I wasn't takin' no
notice, and cryin' till she made me cry too. She useter cry all night
'most. An' one day, when I tells 'er to pray to God to 'elp 'er through
'er trouble, she outs with _your_ putty face on a card, she doez, an',
says she, with her poor little smile, 'That's my god, Nursey,' she
says."
"Don't!" I said feebly, putting out my hands to keep off the torture;
"not any more, not now."
"_Don't?_" she repeated. She had risen and was walking up and down the
room with clasped hands--"don't, indeed! No, I won't; but I shan't
forget you! I tell you I've had you in my prayers time and again, when I
thought you'd made a light-o'-love o' my darling. I shan't drop you
outer them now I know she was your own wedded wife as you chucked away
when you'd tired of her, and left 'er to eat 'er 'art out with longin'
for you. Oh! I pray to God above us to pay you scot and lot for all you
done to 'er! You killed my pretty. The price will be required of you,
young man, even to the uttermost farthing! O God in heaven, make him
suffer! Make him feel it!"
She stamped her foot as she passed me. I stood quite still; I bit my lip
till I tasted the blood hot and salt on my tongue.
"She was nothing to you!" cried the woman, walking faster up and down
between the rush chairs and the table; "any fool can see that with half
an eye. You didn't love her, so you don't feel nothin' now; but some day
you'll care for some one, and then you shall know what she felt--if
there's any justice in heaven!"
I, too, rose, walked across the room, and leaned against the wall. I
heard her words without understanding them.
"Can't you feel _nothin'_? Are you mader stone? Come an' look at 'er
lyin' there so quiet. She don't fret arter the likes o' you no more now.
She won't sit no more a-lookin' outer winder an' sayin' nothin'--only
droppin' 'er tears one by one, slow, slow on her lap. Come an' see 'er;
come an' see what you done to my pretty--an' then ye can go. Nobody
wants you 'ere. _She_ don't want you now. But p'r'aps you'd like to see
'er safe underground fust? I'll be bound you'll put a big slab on
'er--to make sure _she_ don't rise again."
I turned on her. Her thin face was white with grief and impotent rage.
Her claw-like hands were clenched.
"Woman," I said, "have mercy!"
She paused, and looked at me.
"Eh?" she said.
"Have mercy!" I said again.
"Mercy? You should 'a thought o' that before. You 'adn't no mercy on
'er. She loved you--she died lovin' you. An' if I wasn't a Christian
woman, I'd kill you for it--like the rat you are! That I would, though I
'ad to swing for it arterwards."
I caught the woman's hands and held them fast, in spite of her
resistance.
"Don't you understand?" I said savagely. "We loved each other. She died
loving me. I have to live loving her. And it's _her_ you pity. I tell
you it was all a mistake--a stupid, stupid mistake. Take me to her, and
for pity's sake let me be left alone with her."
She hesitated; then said in a voice only a shade less hard--
"Well, come along, then."
We moved towards the door. As she opened it a faint, weak cry fell on my
ear. My heart stood still.
"What's that?" I asked, stopping on the threshold.
"Your child," she said shortly.
That, too! Oh, my love! oh, my poor love! All these long months!
"She allus said she'd send for you when she'd got over her trouble," the
woman said as we climbed the stairs. "'I'd like him to see his little
baby, nurse,' she says; 'our little baby. It'll be all right when the
baby's born,' she says. 'I know he'll come to me then. You'll see.' And
I never said nothin'--not thinkin' you'd come if she was your leavins,
and not dreamin' as you could be 'er husband an' could stay away from
'er a hour--her bein' as she was. Hush!"
She drew a key from her pocket and fitted it to the lock. She opened the
door and I followed her in. It was a large, dark room, full of
old-fashioned furniture. There were wax candles in brass candlesticks
and a smell of lavender.
The big four-post bed was covered with white.
"My lamb--my poor pretty lamb!" said the woman, beginning to cry for the
first time as she drew back the sheet. "Don't she look beautiful?"
I stood by the bedside. I looked down on my wife's face. Just so I had
seen it lie on the pillow beside me in the early morning when the wind
and the dawn came up from beyond the sea. She did not look like one
dead. Her lips were still red, and it seemed to me that a tinge of
colour lay on her cheek. It seemed to me, too, that if I kissed her she
would wake, and put her slight hand on my neck, and lay her cheek
against mine--and that we should tell each other everything, and weep
together, and understand and be comforted.
So I stooped and laid my lips to hers as the old nurse stole from the
room.
But the red lips were like marble, and she did not wake. She will not
wake now ever any more.
I tell you again there are some things that cannot be written.
III.
I lay that night in a big room filled with heavy, dark furniture, in a
great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains--a bed the counterpart
of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last.
They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she
saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most.
I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow
fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had
brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head
over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told
myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me that it was I who
had done that. The tall clock at the stairhead sounded the
hours--eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was
dark and very still.
I had not been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the
intoxication of grief--a real drunkenness, more merciful than the calm
that comes after.
Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what
was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought.
And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been
about two that I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the
ticking of the clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew
perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet
determined not to hear it, _because it came from the next room_--the
room where the corpse lay.
And I did not wish to hear that sound, because I knew it meant that I
was nervous--miserably nervous--a coward and a brute. It meant that I,
having killed my wife as surely as though I had put a knife in her
breast, had now sunk so low as to be afraid of her dead body--the dead
body that lay in the room next to mine. The heads of the beds were
placed against the same wall; and from that wall I had fancied I heard
slight, slight, almost inaudible sounds. So when I say that I became
aware of them I mean that I at last heard a sound so distinct as to
leave no room for doubt or question. It brought me to a sitting position
in the bed, and the drops of sweat gathered heavily on my forehead and
fell on my cold hands as I held my breath and listened.
I don't know how long I sat there--there was no further sound--and at
last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.
"You fool!" I said to myself; "dead or alive, is she not your darling,
your heart's heart? Would you not go near to die of joy if she came to
you? Pray God to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives
you!"
"I wish she would come," myself answered in words, while every fibre of
my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.
I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked
at the polished furniture--the commonplace details of an ordinary room.
Then I thought of her, lying alone, so near me, so quiet under the white
sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did
move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up, and walked across
the floor and turned the door-handle?
As I thought it, I heard--plainly, unmistakably heard--the door of the
chamber of death open slowly--I heard slow steps in the passage, slow,
heavy steps--I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain
hands, that felt for the latch.
Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.
I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened--that door
on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet I dared not turn
away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of
my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the
bed-foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its
chin. There was a scent of lavender. Its eyes were wide open and looked
at me with love unspeakable.
I could have shrieked aloud.
My wife spoke. It was the same dear voice that I had loved so to hear,
but it was very weak and faint now; and now I trembled as I listened.
"You aren't afraid of me, darling, are you, though I am dead? I heard
all you said to me when you came, but I couldn't answer. But now I've
come back from the dead to tell you. I wasn't really so bad as you
thought me. Elvire had told me she loved Oscar. I only wrote the letter
to make it easier for you. I was too proud to tell you when you were so
angry, but I am not proud any more now. You'll love me again now, won't
you, now I'm dead? One always forgives dead people."
The poor ghost's voice was hollow and faint. Abject terror paralyzed me.
I could answer nothing.
"Say you forgive me," the thin, monotonous voice went on; "say you love
me again."
I had to speak. Coward as I was, I did manage to stammer--
"Yes; I love you. I have always loved you, God help me!"
The sound of my own voice reassured me, and I ended more firmly than I
began. The figure by the bed swayed a little unsteadily.
"I suppose," she said wearily, "you would be afraid, now I am dead, if I
came round to you and kissed you?"
She made a movement as though she would have come to me.
Then I did shriek aloud, again and again, and covered my face with the
sheet, and wound it round my head and body, and held it with all my
force.
There was a moment's silence. Then I heard my door close, and then a
sound of feet and of voices, and I heard something heavy fall. I
disentangled my head from the sheet. My room was empty. Then reason came
back to me. I leaped from the bed.
"Ida, my darling, come back! I am not afraid! I love you! Come back!
Come back!"
I sprang to my door and flung it open. Some one was bringing a light
along the passage. On the floor, outside the door of the death-chamber,
was a huddled heap--the corpse, in its grave-clothes. Dead, dead, dead.
* * * * *
She is buried in Mellor churchyard, and there is no stone over her.
Now, whether it was catalepsy--as the doctors said--or whether my love
came back even from the dead to me who loved her, I shall never know;
but this I know--that, if I had held out my arms to her as she stood at
my bed-foot--if I had said, "Yes, even from the grave, my darling--from
hell itself, come back, come back to me!"--if I had had room in my
coward's heart for anything but the unreasoning terror that killed love
in that hour, I should not now be here alone. I shrank from her--I
feared her--I would not take her to my heart. And now she will not come
to me any more.
Why do I go on living?
You see, there is the child. It is four years old now, and it has never
spoken and never smiled.
_MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE._
Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect
people to believe it. Nowadays a "rational explanation" is required
before belief is possible. Let me then, at once, offer the "rational
explanation" which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale
of my life's tragedy. It is held that we were "under a delusion," Laura
and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the
whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can
judge, when he, too, has heard my story, how far this is an
"explanation," and in what sense it is "rational." There were three who
took part in this: Laura and I and another man. The other man still
lives, and can speak to the truth of the least credible part of my
story.
* * * * *
I never in my life knew what it was to have as much money as I required
to supply the most ordinary needs--good colours, books, and
cab-fares--and when we were married we knew quite well that we should
only be able to live at all by "strict punctuality and attention to
business." I used to paint in those days, and Laura used to write, and
we felt sure we could keep the pot at least simmering. Living in town
was out of the question, so we went to look for a cottage in the
country, which should be at once sanitary and picturesque. So rarely do
these two qualities meet in one cottage that our search was for some
time quite fruitless. We tried advertisements, but most of the desirable
rural residences which we did look at proved to be lacking in both
essentials, and when a cottage chanced to have drains it always had
stucco as well and was shaped like a tea-caddy. And if we found a vine
or rose-covered porch, corruption invariably lurked within. Our minds
got so befogged by the eloquence of house-agents and the rival
disadvantages of the fever-traps and outrages to beauty which we had
seen and scorned, that I very much doubt whether either of us, on our
wedding morning, knew the difference between a house and a haystack. But
when we got away from friends and house-agents, on our honeymoon, our
wits grew clear again, and we knew a pretty cottage when at last we saw
one. It was at Brenzett--a little village set on a hill over against the
southern marshes. We had gone there, from the seaside village where we
were staying, to see the church, and two fields from the church we found
this cottage. It stood quite by itself, about two miles from the
village. It was a long, low building, with rooms sticking out in
unexpected places. There was a bit of stone-work--ivy-covered and
moss-grown, just two old rooms, all that was left of a big house that
had once stood there--and round this stone-work the house had grown up.
Stripped of its roses and jasmine it would have been hideous. As it
stood it was charming, and after a brief examination we took it. It was
absurdly cheap. The rest of our honeymoon we spent in grubbing about in
second-hand shops in the county town, picking up bits of old oak and
Chippendale chairs for our furnishing. We wound up with a run up to town
and a visit to Liberty's, and soon the low oak-beamed lattice-windowed
rooms began to be home. There was a jolly old-fashioned garden, with
grass paths, and no end of hollyhocks and sunflowers, and big lilies.
From the window you could see the marsh-pastures, and beyond them the
blue, thin line of the sea. We were as happy as the summer was glorious,
and settled down into work sooner than we ourselves expected. I was
never tired of sketching the view and the wonderful cloud effects from
the open lattice, and Laura would sit at the table and write verses
about them, in which I mostly played the part of foreground.
We got a tall old peasant woman to do for us. Her face and figure were
good, though her cooking was of the homeliest; but she understood all
about gardening, and told us all the old names of the coppices and
cornfields, and the stories of the smugglers and highwaymen, and, better
still, of the "things that walked," and of the "sights" which met one in
lonely glens of a starlight night. She was a great comfort to us,
because Laura hated housekeeping as much as I loved folklore, and we
soon came to leave all the domestic business to Mrs. Dorman, and to use
her legends in little magazine stories which brought in the jingling
guinea.
We had three months of married happiness, and did not have a single
quarrel. One October evening I had been down to smoke a pipe with the
doctor--our only neighbour--a pleasant young Irishman. Laura had stayed
at home to finish a comic sketch of a village episode for the _Monthly
Marplot_. I left her laughing over her own jokes, and came in to find
her a crumpled heap of pale muslin weeping on the window seat.
"Good heavens, my darling, what's the matter?" I cried, taking her in my
arms. She leaned her little dark head against my shoulder and went on
crying. I had never seen her cry before--we had always been so happy,
you see--and I felt sure some frightful misfortune had happened.
"What _is_ the matter? Do speak."
"It's Mrs. Dorman," she sobbed.
"What has she done?" I inquired, immensely relieved.
"She says she must go before the end of the month, and she says her
niece is ill; she's gone down to see her now, but I don't believe that's
the reason, because her niece is always ill. I believe some one has been
setting her against us. Her manner was so queer----"
"Never mind, Pussy," I said; "whatever you do, don't cry, or I shall
have to cry too, to keep you in countenance, and then you'll never
respect your man again!"
She dried her eyes obediently on my handkerchief, and even smiled
faintly.
"But you see," she went on, "it is really serious, because these village
people are so sheepy, and if one won't do a thing you may be quite sure
none of the others will. And I shall have to cook the dinners, and wash
up the hateful greasy plates; and you'll have to carry cans of water
about, and clean the boots and knives--and we shall never have any time
for work, or earn any money, or anything. We shall have to work all day,
and only be able to rest when we are waiting for the kettle to boil!"
I represented to her that even if we had to perform these duties, the
day would still present some margin for other toils and recreations. But
she refused to see the matter in any but the greyest light. She was very
unreasonable, my Laura, but I could not have loved her any more if she
had been as reasonable as Whately.
"I'll speak to Mrs. Dorman when she comes back, and see if I can't come
to terms with her," I said. "Perhaps she wants a rise in her screw. It
will be all right. Let's walk up to the church."
The church was a large and lonely one, and we loved to go there,
especially upon bright nights. The path skirted a wood, cut through it
once, and ran along the crest of the hill through two meadows, and round
the churchyard wall, over which the old yews loomed in black masses of
shadow. This path, which was partly paved, was called "the bier-balk,"
for it had long been the way by which the corpses had been carried to
burial. The churchyard was richly treed, and was shaded by great elms
which stood just outside and stretched their majestic arms in
benediction over the happy dead. A large, low porch let one into the
building by a Norman doorway and a heavy oak door studded with iron.
Inside, the arches rose into darkness, and between them the reticulated
windows, which stood out white in the moonlight. In the chancel, the
windows were of rich glass, which showed in faint light their noble
colouring, and made the black oak of the choir pews hardly more solid
than the shadows. But on each side of the altar lay a grey marble figure
of a knight in full plate armour lying upon a low slab, with hands held
up in everlasting prayer, and these figures, oddly enough, were always
to be seen if there was any glimmer of light in the church. Their names
were lost, but the peasants told of them that they had been fierce and
wicked men, marauders by land and sea, who had been the scourge of their
time, and had been guilty of deeds so foul that the house they had lived
in--the big house, by the way, that had stood on the site of our
cottage--had been stricken by lightning and the vengeance of Heaven. But
for all that, the gold of their heirs had bought them a place in the
church. Looking at the bad hard faces reproduced in the marble, this
story was easily believed.
The church looked at its best and weirdest on that night, for the
shadows of the yew trees fell through the windows upon the floor of the
nave and touched the pillars with tattered shade. We sat down together
without speaking, and watched the solemn beauty of the old church, with
some of that awe which inspired its early builders. We walked to the
chancel and looked at the sleeping warriors. Then we rested some time on
the stone seat in the porch, looking out over the stretch of quiet
moonlit meadows, feeling in every fibre of our being the peace of the
night and of our happy love; and came away at last with a sense that
even scrubbing and blackleading were but small troubles at their worst.
Mrs. Dorman had come back from the village, and I at once invited her to
a _tête-à-tête_.
"Now, Mrs. Dorman," I said, when I had got her into my painting room,
"what's all this about your not staying with us?"
"I should be glad to get away, sir, before the end of the month," she
answered, with her usual placid dignity.
"Have you any fault to find, Mrs. Dorman?"
"None at all, sir; you and your lady have always been most kind, I'm
sure----"
"Well, what is it? Are your wages not high enough?"
"No, sir, I gets quite enough."
"Then why not stay?"
"I'd rather not"--with some hesitation--"my niece is ill."
"But your niece has been ill ever since we came."
No answer. There was a long and awkward silence. I broke it.
"Can't you stay for another month?" I asked.
"No, sir. I'm bound to go by Thursday."
And this was Monday!
"Well, I must say, I think you might have let us know before. There's no
time now to get any one else, and your mistress is not fit to do heavy
housework. Can't you stay till next week?"
"I might be able to come back next week."
I was now convinced that all she wanted was a brief holiday, which we
should have been willing enough to let her have, as soon as we could
get a substitute.
"But why must you go this week?" I persisted. "Come, out with it."
Mrs. Dorman drew the little shawl, which she always wore, tightly across
her bosom, as though she were cold. Then she said, with a sort of
effort--
"They say, sir, as this was a big house in Catholic times, and there was
a many deeds done here."
The nature of the "deeds" might be vaguely inferred from the inflection
of Mrs. Dorman's voice--which was enough to make one's blood run cold. I
was glad that Laura was not in the room. She was always nervous, as
highly-strung natures are, and I felt that these tales about our house,
told by this old peasant woman, with her impressive manner and
contagious credulity, might have made our home less dear to my wife.
"Tell me all about it, Mrs. Dorman," I said; "you needn't mind about
telling me. I'm not like the young people who make fun of such things."
Which was partly true.
"Well, sir"--she sank her voice--"you may have seen in the church,
beside the altar, two shapes."
"You mean the effigies of the knights in armour," I said cheerfully.
"I mean them two bodies, drawed out man-size in marble," she returned,
and I had to admit that her description was a thousand times more
graphic than mine, to say nothing of a certain weird force and
uncanniness about the phrase "drawed out man-size in marble."
"They do say, as on All Saints' Eve them two bodies sits up on their
slabs, and gets off of them, and then walks down the aisle, _in their
marble"_--(another good phrase, Mrs. Dorman)--"and as the church clock
strikes eleven they walks out of the church door, and over the graves,
and along the bier-balk, and if it's a wet night there's the marks of
their feet in the morning."
"And where do they go?" I asked, rather fascinated.
"They comes back here to their home, sir, and if any one meets them----"
"Well, what then?" I asked.
But no--not another word could I get from her, save that her niece was
ill and she must go. After what I had heard I scorned to discuss the
niece, and tried to get from Mrs. Dorman more details of the legend. I
could get nothing but warnings.
"Whatever you do, sir, lock the door early on All Saints' Eve, and make
the cross-sign over the doorstep and on the windows."
"But has any one ever seen these things?" I persisted.
"That's not for me to say. I know what I know, sir."
"Well, who was here last year?"
"No one, sir; the lady as owned the house only stayed here in summer,
and she always went to London a full month afore _the_ night. And I'm
sorry to inconvenience you and your lady, but my niece is ill and I
must go on Thursday."
I could have shaken her for her absurd reiteration of that obvious
fiction, after she had told me her real reasons.
She was determined to go, nor could our united entreaties move her in
the least.
I did not tell Laura the legend of the shapes that "walked in their
marble," partly because a legend concerning our house might perhaps
trouble my wife, and partly, I think, from some more occult reason. This
was not quite the same to me as any other story, and I did not want to
talk about it till the day was over. I had very soon ceased to think of
the legend, however. I was painting a portrait of Laura, against the
lattice window, and I could not think of much else. I had got a splendid
background of yellow and grey sunset, and was working away with
enthusiasm at her face. On Thursday Mrs. Dorman went. She relented, at
parting, so far as to say--
"Don't you put yourself about too much, ma'am, and if there's any
little thing I can do next week, I'm sure I shan't mind."
From which I inferred that she wished to come back to us after
Halloween. Up to the last she adhered to the fiction of the niece with
touching fidelity.
Thursday passed off pretty well. Laura showed marked ability in the
matter of steak and potatoes, and I confess that my knives, and the
plates, which I insisted upon washing, were better done than I had dared
to expect.
Friday came. It is about what happened on that Friday that this is
written. I wonder if I should have believed it, if any one had told it
to me. I will write the story of it as quickly and plainly as I can.
Everything that happened on that day is burnt into my brain. I shall not
forget anything, nor leave anything out.
I got up early, I remember, and lighted the kitchen fire, and had just
achieved a smoky success, when my little wife came running down, as
sunny and sweet as the clear October morning itself. We prepared
breakfast together, and found it very good fun. The housework was soon
done, and when brushes and brooms and pails were quiet again, the house
was still indeed. It is wonderful what a difference one makes in a
house. We really missed Mrs. Dorman, quite apart from considerations
concerning pots and pans. We spent the day in dusting our books and
putting them straight, and dined gaily on cold steak and coffee. Laura
was, if possible, brighter and gayer and sweeter than usual, and I began
to think that a little domestic toil was really good for her. We had
never been so merry since we were married, and the walk we had that
afternoon was, I think, the happiest time of all my life. When we had
watched the deep scarlet clouds slowly pale into leaden grey against a
pale-green sky, and saw the white mists curl up along the hedgerows in
the distant marsh, we came back to the house, silently, hand in hand.
"You are sad, my darling," I said, half-jestingly, as we sat down
together in our little parlour. I expected a disclaimer, for my own
silence had been the silence of complete happiness. To my surprise she
said--
"Yes. I think I am sad, or rather I am uneasy. I don't think I'm very
well. I have shivered three or four times since we came in, and it is
not cold, is it?"
"No," I said, and hoped it was not a chill caught from the treacherous
mists that roll up from the marshes in the dying light. No--she said,
she did not think so. Then, after a silence, she spoke suddenly--
"Do you ever have presentiments of evil?"
"No," I said, smiling, "and I shouldn't believe in them if I had."
"I do," she went on; "the night my father died I knew it, though he was
right away in the north of Scotland." I did not answer in words.
She sat looking at the fire for some time in silence, gently stroking my
hand. At last she sprang up, came behind me, and, drawing my head back,
kissed me.
"There, it's over now," she said. "What a baby I am! Come, light the
candles, and we'll have some of these new Rubinstein duets."
And we spent a happy hour or two at the piano.
At about half-past ten I began to long for the good-night pipe, but
Laura looked so white that I felt it would be brutal of me to fill our
sitting-room with the fumes of strong cavendish.
"I'll take my pipe outside," I said.
"Let me come, too."
"No, sweetheart, not to-night; you're much too tired. I shan't be long.
Get to bed, or I shall have an invalid to nurse to-morrow as well as the
boots to clean."
I kissed her and was turning to go, when she flung her arms round my
neck, and held me as if she would never let me go again. I stroked her
hair.
"Come, Pussy, you're over-tired. The housework has been too much for
you."
She loosened her clasp a little and drew a deep breath.
"No. We've been very happy to-day, Jack, haven't we? Don't stay out too
long."
"I won't, my dearie."
I strolled out of the front door, leaving it unlatched. What a night it
was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals
from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars.
Through all the rush of the cloud river, the moon swam, breasting the
waves and disappearing again in the darkness. When now and again her
light reached the woodlands they seemed to be slowly and noiselessly
waving in time to the swing of the clouds above them. There was a
strange grey light over all the earth; the fields had that shadowy bloom
over them which only comes from the marriage of dew and moonshine, or
frost and starlight.
I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and the
changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be
abroad. There was no skurrying of rabbits, or twitter of the half-asleep
birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that
drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the
woodland paths. Across the meadows I could see the church tower standing
out black and grey against the sky. I walked there thinking over our
three months of happiness--and of my wife, her dear eyes, her loving
ways. Oh, my little girl! my own little girl; what a vision came then of
a long, glad life for you and me together!
I heard a bell-beat from the church. Eleven already! I turned to go in,
but the night held me. I could not go back into our little warm rooms
yet. I would go up to the church. I felt vaguely that it would be good
to carry my love and thankfulness to the sanctuary whither so many loads
of sorrow and gladness had been borne by the men and women of the dead
years.
I looked in at the low window as I went by. Laura was half lying on her
chair in front of the fire. I could not see her face, only her little
head showed dark against the pale blue wall. She was quite still.
Asleep, no doubt. My heart reached out to her, as I went on. There must
be a God, I thought, and a God who was good. How otherwise could
anything so sweet and dear as she have ever been imagined?
I walked slowly along the edge of the wood. A sound broke the stillness
of the night, it was a rustling in the wood. I stopped and listened. The
sound stopped too. I went on, and now distinctly heard another step than
mine answer mine like an echo. It was a poacher or a wood-stealer, most
likely, for these were not unknown in our Arcadian neighbourhood. But
whoever it was, he was a fool not to step more lightly. I turned into
the wood, and now the footstep seemed to come from the path I had just
left. It must be an echo, I thought. The wood looked perfect in the
moonlight. The large dying ferns and the brushwood showed where through
thinning foliage the pale light came down. The tree trunks stood up
like Gothic columns all around me. They reminded me of the church, and I
turned into the bier-balk, and passed through the corpse-gate between
the graves to the low porch. I paused for a moment on the stone seat
where Laura and I had watched the fading landscape. Then I noticed that
the door of the church was open, and I blamed myself for having left it
unlatched the other night. We were the only people who ever cared to
come to the church except on Sundays, and I was vexed to think that
through our carelessness the damp autumn airs had had a chance of
getting in and injuring the old fabric. I went in. It will seem strange,
perhaps, that I should have gone half-way up the aisle before I
remembered--with a sudden chill, followed by as sudden a rush of
self-contempt--that this was the very day and hour when, according to
tradition, the "shapes drawed out man-size in marble" began to walk.
Having thus remembered the legend, and remembered it with a shiver, of
which I was ashamed, I could not do otherwise than walk up towards the
altar, just to look at the figures--as I said to myself; really what I
wanted was to assure myself, first, that I did not believe the legend,
and, secondly, that it was not true. I was rather glad that I had come.
I thought now I could tell Mrs. Dorman how vain her fancies were, and
how peacefully the marble figures slept on through the ghastly hour.
With my hands in my pockets I passed up the aisle. In the grey dim light
the eastern end of the church looked larger than usual, and the arches
above the two tombs looked larger too. The moon came out and showed me
the reason. I stopped short, my heart gave a leap that nearly choked me,
and then sank sickeningly.
The "bodies drawed out man-size" _were gone_, and their marble slabs lay
wide and bare in the vague moonlight that slanted through the east
window.
Were they really gone? or was I mad? Clenching my nerves, I stooped and
passed my hand over the smooth slabs, and felt their flat unbroken
surface. Had some one taken the things away? Was it some vile practical
joke? I would make sure, anyway. In an instant I had made a torch of a
newspaper, which happened to be in my pocket, and lighting it held it
high above my head. Its yellow glare illumined the dark arches and those
slabs. The figures _were_ gone. And I was alone in the church; or was I
alone?
And then a horror seized me, a horror indefinable and indescribable--an
overwhelming certainty of supreme and accomplished calamity. I flung
down the torch and tore along the aisle and out through the porch,
biting my lips as I ran to keep myself from shrieking aloud. Oh, was I
mad--or what was this that possessed me? I leaped the churchyard wall
and took the straight cut across the fields, led by the light from our
windows. Just as I got over the first stile, a dark figure seemed to
spring out of the ground. Mad still with that certainty of misfortune, I
made for the thing that stood in my path, shouting, "Get out of the
way, can't you!"
But my push met with a more vigorous resistance than I had expected. My
arms were caught just above the elbow and held as in a vice, and the
raw-boned Irish doctor actually shook me.
"Would ye?" he cried, in his own unmistakable accents--"would ye, then?"
"Let me go, you fool," I gasped. "The marble figures have gone from the
church; I tell you they've gone."
He broke into a ringing laugh. "I'll have to give ye a draught
to-morrow, I see. Ye've bin smoking too much and listening to old wives'
tales."
"I tell you, I've seen the bare slabs."
"Well, come back with me. I'm going up to old Palmer's--his daughter's
ill; we'll look in at the church and let me see the bare slabs."
"You go, if you like," I said, a little less frantic for his laughter;
"I'm going home to my wife."
"Rubbish, man," said he; "d'ye think I'll permit of that? Are ye to go
saying all yer life that ye've seen solid marble endowed with vitality,
and me to go all me life saying ye were a coward? No, sir--ye shan't do
ut."
The night air--a human voice--and I think also the physical contact with
this six feet of solid common sense, brought me back a little to my
ordinary self, and the word "coward" was a mental shower-bath.
"Come on, then," I said sullenly; "perhaps you're right."
He still held my arm tightly. We got over the stile and back to the
church. All was still as death. The place smelt very damp and earthy. We
walked up the aisle. I am not ashamed to confess that I shut my eyes: I
knew the figures would not be there. I heard Kelly strike a match.
"Here they are, ye see, right enough; ye've been dreaming or drinking,
asking yer pardon for the imputation."
I opened my eyes. By Kelly's expiring vesta I saw two shapes lying "in
their marble" on their slabs. I drew a deep breath, and caught his
hand.
"I'm awfully indebted to you," I said. "It must have been some trick of
light, or I have been working rather hard, perhaps that's it. Do you
know, I was quite convinced they were gone."
"I'm aware of that," he answered rather grimly; "ye'll have to be
careful of that brain of yours, my friend, I assure ye."
He was leaning over and looking at the right-hand figure, whose stony
face was the most villainous and deadly in expression.
"By Jove," he said, "something has been afoot here--this hand is
broken."
And so it was. I was certain that it had been perfect the last time
Laura and I had been there.
"Perhaps some one has _tried_ to remove them," said the young doctor.
"That won't account for my impression," I objected.
"Too much painting and tobacco will account for that, well enough."
"Come along," I said, "or my wife will be getting anxious. You'll come
in and have a drop of whisky and drink confusion to ghosts and better
sense to me."
"I ought to go up to Palmer's, but it's so late now I'd best leave it
till the morning," he replied. "I was kept late at the Union, and I've
had to see a lot of people since. All right, I'll come back with ye."
I think he fancied I needed him more than did Palmer's girl, so,
discussing how such an illusion could have been possible, and deducing
from this experience large generalities concerning ghostly apparitions,
we walked up to our cottage. We saw, as we walked up the garden-path,
that bright light streamed out of the front door, and presently saw that
the parlour door was open too. Had she gone out?
"Come in," I said, and Dr. Kelly followed me into the parlour. It was
all ablaze with candles, not only the wax ones, but at least a dozen
guttering, glaring tallow dips, stuck in vases and ornaments in unlikely
places. Light, I knew, was Laura's remedy for nervousness. Poor child!
Why had I left her? Brute that I was.
We glanced round the room, and at first we did not see her. The window
was open, and the draught set all the candles flaring one way. Her chair
was empty and her handkerchief and book lay on the floor. I turned to
the window. There, in the recess of the window, I saw her. Oh, my child,
my love, had she gone to that window to watch for me? And what had come
into the room behind her? To what had she turned with that look of
frantic fear and horror? Oh, my little one, had she thought that it was
I whose step she heard, and turned to meet--what?
She had fallen back across a table in the window, and her body lay half
on it and half on the window-seat, and her head hung down over the
table, the brown hair loosened and fallen to the carpet. Her lips were
drawn back, and her eyes wide, wide open. They saw nothing now. What had
they seen last?
The doctor moved towards her, but I pushed him aside and sprang to her;
caught her in my arms and cried--
"It's all right, Laura! I've got you safe, wifie."
She fell into my arms in a heap. I clasped her and kissed her, and
called her by all her pet names, but I think I knew all the time that
she was dead. Her hands were tightly clenched. In one of them she held
something fast. When I was quite sure that she was dead, and that
nothing mattered at all any more, I let him open her hand to see what
she held.
It was a grey marble finger.
_THE MASS FOR THE DEAD_.
I was awake--widely, cruelly awake. I had been awake all night; what
sleep could there be for me when the woman I loved was to be married
next morning--married, and not to me?
I went to my room early; the family party in the drawing-room maddened
me. Grouped about the round table with the stamped plush cover, each was
busy with work, or book, or newspaper, but not too busy to stab my heart
through and through with their talk of the wedding.
Her people were near neighbours of mine, so why should her marriage not
be canvassed in my home circle?
They did not mean to be cruel; they did not know that I loved her; but
she knew it. I told her, but she knew it before that. She knew it from
the moment when I came back from three years of musical study in
Germany--came back and met her in the wood where we used to go nutting
when we were children.
I looked into her eyes, and my whole soul trembled with thankfulness
that I was living in a world that held her also. I turned and walked by
her side, through the tangled green wood, and we talked of the long-ago
days, and it was, "Have you forgotten?" and "Do you remember?" till we
reached her garden gate. Then I said--
"Good-bye; no, _auf wiedersehn_, and in a very little time, I hope."
And she answered--
"Good-bye. By the way, you haven't congratulated me yet."
"Congratulated you?"
"Yes, did I not tell you I am to marry Mr. Benoliel next month?"
And she turned away, and went up the garden slowly.
I asked my people, and they said it was true. Kate, my dear playfellow,
was to marry this Spaniard, rich, wilful, accustomed to win, polished in
manners and base in life. Why was she to marry him?
"No one knows," said my father, "but her father is talked about in the
city, and Benoliel, the Spaniard, is rich. Perhaps that's it."
That was it. She told me so when, after two weeks spent with her and
near her, I implored her to break so vile a chain and to come to me, who
loved her--whom she loved.
"You are quite right," she said calmly. We were sitting in the
window-seat of the oak parlour in her father's desolate old house. "I do
love you, and I shall marry Mr. Benoliel."
"Why?"
"Look around you and ask me why, if you can."
I looked around--on the shabby, bare room, with its faded hangings of
sage-green moreen, its threadbare carpet, its patched, washed-out chintz
chair-covers. I looked out through the square, latticed window at the
ragged, unkempt lawn, at her own gown--of poor material, though she wore
it as queens might desire to wear ermine--and I understood.
Kate is obstinate; it is her one fault; I knew how vain would be my
entreaties, yet I offered them; how unavailing my arguments, yet they
were set forth; how useless my love and my sorrow, yet I showed them to
her.
"No," she answered, but she flung her arms round my neck as she spoke,
and held me as one may hold one's best treasure. "No, no; you are poor,
and he is rich. You wouldn't have me break my father's heart: he's so
proud, and if he doesn't get some money next month, he will be ruined.
I'm not deceiving any one. Mr. Benoliel knows I don't care for him; and
if I marry him, he is going to advance my father a large sum of money.
Oh, I assure you that everything has been talked over and settled. There
is no going from it."
"Child! child!" I cried, "how calmly you speak of it! Don't you see that
you are selling your soul and throwing mine away?"
"Father Fabian says I am doing right," she answered, unclasping her
hands, but holding mine in them, and looking at me with those clear,
grey eyes of hers. "Are we to be unselfish in everything else, and in
love to think only of our own happiness? I love you, and I shall marry
him. Would you rather the positions were reversed?"
"Yes," I said, "for then I would make you love me."
"Perhaps _he_ will," she said bitterly. Even in that moment her mouth
trembled with the ghost of a smile. She always loved to tease. She goes
through more moods in a day than most other women in a year. Drowning
the smile came tears, but she controlled them, and she said--
"Good-bye; you see I am right, don't you? Oh, Jasper, I wish I hadn't
told you I loved you. It will only make you more unhappy."
"It makes my one happiness," I answered; "nothing can take that from me.
And that happiness _he_ will never have. Say again that you love me!"
"I love you! I love you! I love you!"
With further folly of tears and mad loving words we parted, and I bore
my heartache away, leaving her to bear hers into her new life.
And now she was to be married to-morrow, and I could not sleep.
When the darkness became unbearable I lighted a candle, and then lay
staring vacantly at the roses on the wall-paper, or following with my
eyes the lines and curves of the heavy mahogany furniture.
The solidity of my surroundings oppressed me. In the dull light the
wardrobe loomed like a hearse, and my violin case looked like a child's
coffin.
I reached a book and read till my eyes ached and the letters danced a
_pas fantastique_ up and down the page.
I got up and had ten minutes with the dumbbells. I sponged my face and
hands with cold water and tried again to sleep--vainly. I lay there,
miserably wide awake.
I tried to say poetry, the half-forgotten tasks of my school days even,
but through everything ran the refrain--
"Kate is to be married to-morrow, and not to me, not to me!"
I tried counting up to a thousand. I tried to imagine sheep in a lane,
and to count them as they jumped through a gap in an imaginary
hedge--all the time-honoured spells with which sleep is wooed--vainly.
Then the Waits came, and a torture to the nerves was superadded to the
torture of the heart. After fifteen minutes of carols every fibre of me
seemed vibrating in an agony of physical misery.
To banish the echo of "The Mistletoe Bough," I hummed softly to myself
a melody of Palestrina's, and felt more awake than ever.
Then the thing happened which nothing will ever explain. As I lay there
I heard, breaking through and gradually overpowering the air I was
suggesting, a harmony which I had never heard before, beautiful beyond
description, and as distinct and definite as any song man's ears have
ever listened to.
My first half-formed thought was, "more Waits," but the music was choral
music, true and sweet; with it mingled an organ's notes, and with every
note the music grew in volume. It is absurd to suggest that I dreamed
it, for, still hearing the music, I leaped out of bed and opened the
window. The music grew fainter. There was no one to be seen in the snowy
garden below. Shivering, I shut the window. The music grew more
distinct, and I became aware that I was listening to a mass--a funeral
mass, and one which I had never heard before. I lay in my bed and
followed the whole course of the office.
The music ceased.
I was sitting up in bed, my candle alight, and myself as wide awake as
ever, and more than ever possessed by the thought of _her_.
But with a difference. Before, I had only mourned the loss of her: now,
my thoughts of her were mingled with an indescribable dread. The sense
of death and decay that had come to me with that strange, beautiful
music, coloured all my thoughts. I was filled with fancies of hushed
houses, black garments, rooms where white flowers and white linen lay in
a deathly stillness. I heard echoes of tears, and of dim-voiced bells
tolling monotonously. I shivered, as it were on the brink of irreparable
woe, and in its contemplation I watched the dull dawn slowly overcome
the pale flame of my candle, now burnt down into its socket.
I felt that I must see Kate once again before she gave herself away.
Before ten o'clock I was in the oak parlour. She came to me. As she
entered the room, her pallor, her swollen eyelids and the misery in her
eyes wrung my heart as even that night of agony had not done. I
literally could not speak. I held out my hands.
Would she reproach me for coming to her again, for forcing upon her a
second time the anguish of parting?
She did not. She laid her hands in mine, and said--
"I am thankful you have come; do you know, I think I am going mad? Don't
let me go mad, Jasper."
The look in her eyes underlined her words.
I stammered something and kissed her hands. I was with her again, and
joy fought again with grief.
"I must tell some one. If I am mad, don't lock me up. Take care of me,
won't you?"
Would I not?
"Understand," she went on, "it was not a dream. I was wide awake,
thinking of you. The Waits had not long gone, and I--I was looking at
your likeness. I was not asleep."
I shivered as I held her fast.
"As Heaven sees us, I did not dream it. I heard a mass sung, and,
Jasper, it was a mass for the dead. I followed the office. You are not a
Catholic, but I thought--I feared--oh, I don't know what I thought. I am
thankful there is nothing wrong with you."
I felt a sudden certainty, and complete sense of power possess me. Now,
in this her moment of weakness, while she was so completely under the
influence of a strong emotion, I could and would save her from Benoliel,
and myself from life-long pain.
"Kate," I said, "I believe it is a warning. You shall not marry this
man. You shall marry me, and none other."
She leaned her head against my shoulder; she seemed to have forgotten
her father and all the reasons for her marriage with Benoliel.
"You don't think I'm mad? No? Then take care of me; take me away; I
feel safe with you."
Thus all obstacles vanished in less time than the length of a lover's
kiss. I dared not stop to consider the coincidence of supernatural
warning--nor what it might mean. Face to face with crowned hope, I am
proud to remember that common sense held her own. The room in which we
were had a French window. I fetched her garden hat and a shawl from the
hall, and we went out through the still, white garden. We did not meet a
soul. When we reached my father's garden I took her in by the back way,
to the summer-house, and left her, though I was half afraid to leave
her, while I went into the house. I snatched my violin and cheque book,
took all my spare money, scrawled a line to my father and rejoined her.
Still no one had seen us.
We walked to a station five miles away; and by the time Benoliel would
reach the church, I was leaving Doctors' Commons with a special licence
in my pocket. Two hours later Kate was my wife, and we were quietly and
prosaically eating our wedding-breakfast in the dining-room of the Grand
Hotel.
"And where shall we go?" I said.
"I don't know," she answered, smiling; "you have not much money, have
you?"
"Oh dear me, yes. I'm not rich, but I'm not absolutely a church mouse."
"Could we go to Devonshire?" she asked, twisting her new ring round and
round.
"Devonshire! Why, that is where----"
"Yes, I know: Benoliel arranged to go there. Jasper, I am afraid of
Benoliel."
"Then why----"
"Foolish person," she answered. "Do you think that Benoliel will be
likely to go to Devonshire _now_?"
We went to Devonshire--I had had a small legacy a few months earlier,
and I did not permit money cares to trouble my new and beautiful
happiness. My only fear was that she would be saddened by thoughts of
her father; but I am thankful to remember that in those first days she,
too, was happy--so happy that there seemed to be hardly room in her
mind for any thought but of me. And every hour of every day I said to my
soul--
"But for that portent, whatever it boded, she might have been not my
wife but his."
The first four or five days of our marriage are flowers that memory
keeps always fresh. Kate's face had recovered its wild-rose bloom, and
she laughed and sang and jested and enjoyed all our little daily
adventures with the fullest, freest-hearted gaiety. Then I committed the
supreme imbecility of my life--one of those acts of folly on which one
looks back all one's life with a half stamp of the foot, and the
unanswerable question, "How on earth could I have been such a fool?"
We were sitting in a little sitting-room, hideous in intention, but
redeemed by blazing fire and the fact that two were there, sitting
hand-in-hand, gazing into the fire and talking of their future and of
their love. There was nothing to trouble us; no one had discovered our
whereabouts, and my wife's fear of Benoliel's revenge seemed to have
dissolved before the flame of our happiness.
And as we sat there, peaceful and untroubled, the Imp of the Perverse
jogged my elbow, as, alas! he does so often, and I was moved to tell my
wife that I, too, had heard that unearthly midnight music--that her
hearing of it was not, as she had grown to think, a mere nightmare--a
strange dream--but something more strange, more significant. I told her
how I had heard the mass for the dead, and all the tale of that night.
She listened silently, and I thought her strangely indifferent. When I
had finished, she took her hand from mine and covered her face.
"I believe it was a warning to us to flee temptation. We ought never to
have married. Oh, my poor father!"
Her tone was one that I had never heard before. Its hopeless misery
appalled me. And justly. For no arguments, no entreaties, no caresses,
could win my wife back to the mood of an hour before.
She tried to be cheerful, but her gaiety was forced, and her laughter
stung my heart.
She spoke no more about the music, and when I tried to reason with her
about it she smiled a gloomy little smile, and said--
"I cannot be happy. I will not be happy. It is wrong. I have been very
selfish and wicked. You think me very idiotic, I know, but I believe
there is a curse on us. We shall never be happy again."
"Don't you love me any more?" I asked like a fool.
"Love you?" She only repeated my words, but I was satisfied on that
score. But those were miserable days. We loved each other passionately,
yet our hours were spent like those of lovers on the eve of parting.
Long, long silences took the place of foolish little jokes and childish
talk which happy lovers know. And more than once, waking in the night, I
heard my wife sobbing, and feigned sleep, with the bitter knowledge that
I had no power to comfort her. I knew that the thought of her father
was with her always, and that her anxiety about him grew, day by day. I
wore myself out in trying to think of some way to divert her thoughts
from him. I could not, indeed, pay his debts, but I could have him to
live with us, a much greater sacrifice; and having a good connection,
both as a musician and composer, I did not doubt that I could support
her and him in comfort.
But Kate had made up her mind that the disgrace of bankruptcy would
break her father's heart; and my Kate is not easy to convince or
persuade.
At Torquay it occurred to me that perhaps it would be well for her to
see a priest. True, Father Fabian had counselled her to marry Benoliel,
but I could hardly believe that most priests would advise a girl to
marry a bad man, whom she did not love, for the sake of any worldly gain
whatsoever.
She received the suggestion with favour, but without enthusiasm, and we
sought out a Catholic church to make inquiries. As we opened the outer
door of the church we heard music, and as we stood in the entrance and
I laid my hand on the heavy inner door, my other hand was caught by
Kate.
"Jasper," she whispered, "it is the same!"
Some person opening the door behind us compelled us to move forward. In
another moment we stood in the dusky church--stood hand-in-hand in dim
daylight, listening to the same music that each had heard in the lonely
night on the eve of our wedding.
I put my arm round my wife and drew her back.
"Come away, my darling," I whispered; "it is a funeral service."
She turned her eyes on me. "I _must_ understand, I must see who it is. I
shall go mad if you take me away now. I cannot bear any more."
We walked up the aisle, and placed ourselves as near as possible to the
spot where the coffin lay, covered with flowers and with tapers burning
about it. And we heard that music again, every note of it the same that
each had heard before. And when the service was over I whispered to the
sacristan--
"Whose music was that?"
"Our organist's," he answered; "it is the first time they've had it.
Fine, wasn't it?"
"Who is the--who was--who is being buried?"
"A foreign gentleman, sir; they do say as his lady as was to be gave him
the slip on his wedding day, and he'd given her father thousands they
say, if the truth was known."
"But what was he doing here?"
"Well, that's the curious part, sir. To show his independence, what does
he do but go the same tour he'd planned for his wedding trip. And there
was a railway accident, and him and every one in his carriage killed in
a twinkling, so to speak. Lucky for the young lady she was off with
somebody else."
The sacristan laughed softly to himself.
Kate's fingers gripped my arm.
"What was his name?" she asked.
I would not have asked: I did not wish to hear it.
"Benoliel," said the sacristan. "Curious name and curious tale. Every
one's talking of it."
Every one had something else to talk of when it was found that
Benoliel's pride, which had permitted him to buy a wife, had shrunk from
reclaiming the purchase money when the purchase was lost to him. And to
the man who had been willing to sell his daughter, the retention of her
price seemed perfectly natural.
From the moment when she heard Benoliel's name on the sacristan's lips,
all Kate's gaiety and happiness returned. She loved me, and she hated
Benoliel. She was married to me, and he was dead; and his death was far
more of a shock to me than to her. Women are curiously kind and
curiously cruel. And she never could see why her father should not have
kept the money. It is noteworthy that women, even the cleverest and the
best of them, have no perception of what men mean by honour.
How do I account for the music? My good critic, my business is to tell
my story--not to account for it.
And do I not pity Benoliel? Yes. I can afford, now, to pity most men,
alive or dead.
THE END.